Morrison at the Grocery Store
By Anna Mantzaris
The Mart, as we call it in town, starts to look like an art exhibit—frozen pizzas spread around the perimeter of the store thawing like lost truck wheels, clippings of Manzanita from the parking lot placed on checkout conveyor belts. Morrison makes flower crowns of bay laurel and birds of paradise for the cashiers. He replaces price tags and barcodes with lines of poetry and quotes from Camus. “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” displayed by the Folgers.
He takes over the store announcements, quoting Blake’s “A Little Boy Lost” when a regular shopper’s son disappears into the candy aisle.
“I love you like the little bird,” says Morrison slow, measured as the mother anxiously stands by. I swoon, holding a broccoli crown like wedding bouquet, waiting for mother and child to reunite.
****
The first time I speak to Morrison, he’s stacking jars of fiddlehead ferns. Aisle 5. Without a word, he haphazardly arranges the green labels, some half-twisted, some facing front, a slanted pyramid with toppled-off jars rolled and shattered to linoleum floor. Never cautioned-coned.
Curled ferns swirling about.
It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s that he does care. He’ll tell me this later. When we know each other. He tells me he doesn’t want to bore the kids looking up at shelves and have them see the same thing over and over.
He emits rockstar genius even stocking shelves.
He convinced his boss, Robby, the store manager, who’s also a guitarist in his band, that his alternative shelf-stocking method (Screw corporate!) is a good idea. But everyone knows it doesn’t take much to convince Robby of anything. If he’s smoking a joint and you tell him it’s yours, he’ll hand it over.
I speak to Morrison. The day of the fiddlehead ferns. For the first time. I walk by and hold up the package of smoked lox from my basket. Get too close. Smell his woodsy scent and whisper, Salmon says!
I convince myself he smirks but now, in retrospect, I don’t think he did. Later, he’ll say he didn’t hear me. Hadn’t seen me.
But if you had?
He shrugs.
****
The twins.
I don’t like one of my children as much as the other. But it’s not the way you think. It’s the difficult, cranky, colicky one I adore. The tranquil and sleeping sister is secondary. I tell Morrison this.
How it could it be any other way? he says.
I’m thankful it never occurs to him to ask about the father, about where the children came from, if they’re both mine. And I don’t tell him. He just knows my aging mother, who is quickly becoming invisible, takes them nights he stays over.
****
Morrison brings me to a house for sale. He doesn’t have a real estate license but he’s doing showings to help his friend, an agent named Angela Biggar, to make ends meet because Robby doesn’t have the power to give anyone at The Mart a raise. Even Morrison.
Morrison, with pouted lips and come-hither fingers, is featured on the For Sale sign. Angela is a part-time adult film star and I wonder if she doesn’t want to confuse anyone with her busty image on a coroplast yard sign. But Morrison looks like a god with an image that evokes big square footage. Angela often delays showings and doesn’t present offers because she drives down the I-5 every time she gets a film gig. Morrison often goes with her, disappearing for days or weeks, returning to The Mart dressed in his leather pants and fringe, as if he’d never left.
I don’t ask questions.
Morrison takes me on a roundabout tour of the house on a street I’ve never heard of, starting on the roof. We climb up the side of the faltering tudor on a ladder, wait for sun to set and stars to speckle. I put in an offer and invite him to move in.
****
The babies will each have their own room. I will give the bigger, better room with bay window to the one I like least, out of guilt. Morrison nods when I tell him this.
Morrison will need a room, too. For his music. For his studio. So he can finally record. We agree on the primary as his studio and he quickly starts making plans to self-insulate the walls.
Being with him is like being with a bolt of lightning.
****
In between recording and stocking shelves, Morrison talks about his death. Often. I’m not the type of mother to ask him not to speak around the children this way. And they’re still babies. I think. I’ve lost count though one seems like it’s gotten bigger. We talk for several hours about the possibilities., interrupted only by me nursing both children at once.
Lake drowning with nearby canoe, bobbing and empty.
We agree the county funding is too low to dredge a lake unless it’s a search-and-rescue for a child.
Two-seater Cessna plane crash.
More expensive, elaborate. But Morrison likes the idea. We draw sketches deep into the night while sipping scotch. Nose-dived in the Catalina-like sand. A jack-knifed wing saluting a darkening sky.
And then he sketches a bathtub.
****
Robby fires Morrison. But we all saw that coming after a secret shopper came in and Morrison offered him a hit in the stockroom.
When I get to the house Morrison is tossing things into the fire. He’s been building backyard bonfires since he was let go. We sit next to the cackling sticks.
He talks about the downed plane. The capsized canoe. The babies growing old.
He calls me Mrs. Morrison. I call him Lizard King, after he corrals a neighbor’s escaped spiny-tailed iguana. He waved away the monetary reward even though he hasn’t had a paycheck in months. He still goes into The Mart almost daily, arranges the Valencia oranges like a sand mandala in the center of the produce aisle. I ask him why he still goes there.
It’s my calling, Babe.
****
Downtown Morrison is known. For his looks. For his reckless behavior. As an oracle. A soothsayer. For his late nights at the bar. He quickly garners a following. Mostly young women, other musicians, a pastor, wayward teens who travel by skateboard. They gather around by the billiard’s table, in the park at dusk, by the train tracks at dawn. They ask questions about their lives, the universe—nodding in contentment no matter what he tells them.
Sometimes I join the cult. I pack a flask for Morrison and place the twins in a basket and bicycle over. A groupie with a diaper bag. Morrison always smiles when he sees us. Smiles at me. The twins. They smile back.
All hail the Lizard King.
****
Since he lost his job at The Mart, Morrison has been eating a lot of mashed potatoes. He carves russets in a variety of shapes and sizes, tosses them into pots of hot water like live lobsters, pushing the bobbing pieces down with a wooden spoon before capping with lid. He hand-mashes, adding copious amounts of cream and salted butter, freshly ground pepper, a splash of Jack Daniels. He asks if the babies want some. He says it makes sense the twins are Gemini. He says he doesn’t feel like a Sagittarius anymore.
He says his light is dimming.
****
When I come home from work, a job that fades away as soon as I walk out the office door, Morrison is in the backyard again. The twins are tucked in their matching bassinets under the weeping willow.
He’s building the wreckage. Morrison has hacked down the gazebo and hauled the white-painted teak slats to the weedy side yard. His shirt is off. His jeans rolled up. He glistens. He nods when he sees me.
I look at the babies. They are both sleeping.
Peacefully.
I ask him where the metal fin digging into the grass has come from.
Side of Robby’s car. He won’t mind.
Morrison wants to know what we have that’s flammable.
Something that will wildly ignite.
****
Morrison will disappear. From my life. From town. From the county. From the country. Without Morrison, days blur together.
We will never know what’s happened.
Maybe.
I will scour the house for a note. For a sign. For something. It takes several weeks or maybe it’s months. I just know the babies are walking now and one makes pretend phone calls to the other from a shoe.
And then one day. Under the bed in a darkened corner where I had somehow failed to look, I see it. Maybe fallen. Maybe placed there.
A crucifix.
Morrison wore it on occasion, mostly with a white shirt with buttons undone. I asked him why. I asked him if he was religious. What he believed in.
Everything.
The cross reminds me I need to baptize my babies. Make them official.
Make them real.
THE END
Author Bio: Anna Mantzaris is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work has appeared in BlazeVOX, The Cortland Review, Five on the Fifth, Free State Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Milk Candy Review, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing Quarterly, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of “Occupations” (Galileo Press).